Sunday, October 24, 2010

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The song doesn't actually start until the :55 point. So you can enjoy the intro, or fast-forward, or you can "run and extension cord to your TV, set it on the hood of your car and pretend your at the drive-in movies." What's a drive-in movie?

Thursday, October 14, 2010

This month, October 15 - 25, the Anthology Film Archive in New York City features a tribute to the great Timothy Carey, the legendary "character-actor, madman, poet laureate of flatulence, and gonzo auteur." Highlights of the series include rare screenings of Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena, The World's Greatest Sinner, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Poor White Trash, One-Eyed Jacks, plus the recent documentary by Carey's son Romeo, Making Sinner. This really is a rare opportunity to see these films on the screen. How can you go wrong with a guy whose middle name contains the word Agog(lia)?

Saturday, October 9, 2010

In his new book We Never Learn, the Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 (Backbeat Books, 2010), former New Bomb Turks frontman, and now author Eric Davidson occasionally uses phrases like “the last moment,” and “the end days.” Such phrases usually appear in the context of describing some aspect of now-extinct New York City and its last relevant spurts of rocknroll. For example, according to Davidson, the band Pussy Galore rose from “the very last moment of lower Manhattan as the glorified dung heap at the end of the American empire.” Similarly, the Devil Dogs, who formed in New York in 1989, did so during “the end days of the ol’ Bowery landscape.” These qualifiers get dropped into the copy fairly early on, and seem incidental enough at first. But read on and they begin to take on broader implications. In coining the admittedly silly name Gunk Punk and shaping it into a coherent scene worth chronicling, Davidson might be writing about the “last moment” and “end days” of rocknroll itself.
About that scene: the Undergut stretched way past New York City, reaching as far as the West Coast, Europe, Japan, Detroit, Memphis, even Ohio! For its pioneers Davidson nominates bands like the aforementioned Pussy Galore, plus the Raunch Hands, Lazy Cowgirls, Dwarves, Cynics, Gories, Billy Childish, and Death of Samantha, among others. Somehow, without these antecedents, most of which go back to the ‘80’s, the early aughts wouldn’t have been blessed with goobers like the White Stripes and the Hives. Or so the hypothesis goes. In the middle limbo between the scene’s earliest detectable pulse and its commercially viable culmination, we get pretty much the entire Crypt Records catalog, circa mid-90’s.

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